Survey of Practices for Equipment Inspection, Maintenance and Thermal Imaging

The goal of this project is to understand how distribution utilities inspect their systems and how often they do maintenance on reclosers, regulators, and other critical assets, and what are the best practices for using thermal imaging devices. The scope will include a survey of how often inspection is performed, what gets inspected, and observed failure rates for various assets. This will be used as a starting point to dig into what type of inspection is actually being done, and what are the results and lessons learned. For example, there is a lot of interest in understanding how to successfully use infrared heat guns to determine when connections are running too hot and what decisions to take based on the readings.